Mar 29, 2008

The first quarter of the year is gone and here are my family's achievements for the last 3 months.

Paid off 2 of our 3 credit cards

Paid our monthly dues before due dates and paid slightly more than what's due - Whew! Look at all those "due" words!

Gave birth to our wee bub! :)

Paying off our credit cards was courtesy of our savings so at this point we don't have much of it to show for. Yet there are more expenses to come.

Wedding dinner -We are finally taking the plunge and hosting our dinner at a restaurant that has very good reviews. The easiest, and probably the cheapest, way to host a group of 20-25 people at dinner is to have a set menu. We were looking at $35 per head but we found out that was only good for lunch. We chose the $50 per head set menu (as it was the cheaper of the 2 sets) so roughly our bill would be between $800 and $1,250. Not all the invited are coming I think.

Wedding bands/rings - We went for a pair of 9 carat white gold bands. I would like to get an 18 carat pair but we could do that later. At this point, we're pretty satisfied with what we got. The rings cost us around $610. We charged it.

So now that you know what our finances have been up to, it is not looking way up eh? The positive side of it all is that our liabilities (debts) are going down. The negative is that we're not saving much, if we're saving at all. This month our internet-phone-cable bill reached its highest at $258. We shared our internet with our downstairs neighbor but we think they were not aware of their usage. Unfortunately here in NZ, it is not common to offer unlimited access. If we are strict about our usage, we are only to pay around $160. Look at that extra $98! Aargh! No, they no longer have access to our internet and we are within our means so far. So that's good.

Another expense coming up is our homecoming trip this December. Just for the tickets for the 3 of us, we're looking at spending $4,600 including taxes and fees. That's if we purchase the tickets soon. That's just the air fare. We are planning to have our christening there as well, which will probably cost us $500. Of course that's not the only expense we're going to have during our month trip. Oh, there will be a new weekly expense introduced by July and that is called daycare, and we're talking about $200/week.

Those so far are our big ticket purchases this year. Top that with paying debts, I don't know how much we will be saving at all this year. That's why I brought up taking on "challenges" with J. I mentioned lowering his allowance to $130 (from $150) or lowering our internet package to $130 (from $160). I agree with him on the allowance that it should remain the same. We agreed that we'll do a review of our internet usage after 3 months. If we remain below our monthly allowance, we'll reduce our package accordingly.